What is the correlation between TSS (from my Garmin) and load?
Sorry if this has been asked and answered - couldn’t find an explanation here
Short answer: The terms are interchangeable, TSS is just trademarked by trainingpeaks.
Long answer: If the service you are using is licencing the “TSS” (Training Stress Score) name then it is probably using the trainingpeaks (Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan) formula. Other services may use some other similar formula to calculate “Load” or “Training Load” but the idea is still the same. Additionally TSS/Load is based on normalized power and can change depending on what formula is used to calculate NP.
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Weird.
Intervals.icu shows lower TSS/load for a ride than Garmin Connect and Trainerroad does for the same rides.
E.g. my latest ride 28. of july:
Intervals: 226
https://intervals.icu/activities/3828873810
TR: 254
GC:256
All services was set to the same FTP days before
And it seems to be the same picture for all other rides.
What am I missing?
That ride has lots of stops and Intervals.icu does not include stopped time in the training load calculation. There is some debate around this but I think it is the correct approach.
intensity = NP / FTP
TSS = intensity * intensity * hours * 100.0
The hours variable is the key. If you include the stops you can get arbitrary high TSS by sitting around drinking coffee in the middle of a ride, which doesn’t make sense to me.
Even if stopped time is excluded from the NP calculation (thereby reducing intensity) including stops still pushes up TSS.
You can add the “Moving” chart to see where the stop are.
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Cool. Thanks for the quick answer.
I totally agree with your way of not including coffee breaks!